“The Human Self in Course of Time Shall Ripen”

21 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Asteroid 2 Pallas reaches opposition & peak visibility today- The second-biggest asteroid orbiting between Mars & Jupiter. You can find it on the border between Pegasus & Equuleus, the star that marks the nose of Pegasus the Winged Horse. The lovely globular star cluster M15 lies north & a touch east of Pallas. The 3 Beings lie about halfway to the zenith in the southeastern sky after darkness falls

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Feast day of Our Lady of Knock*

“We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!” ~Desmond Tutu

1772 – King Gustav III completes his coup d’état in Sweden, installing himself as an enlightened despot

1831 – Nat Turner leads black slaves in a rebellion in Virginia

1852 – Tlingit Indians destroy Fort Selkirk, Yukon Territory.

1838 – Deathday of Adelbert von Chamisso, German botanist & poet. Author of Peter Schlemihl, a famous story about a man who sold his shadow

1858 – Birthday of Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera. His death left no direct male heir. As a consequence, his brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, was next in the line. His death in 1896 made his oldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive. In 1914, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination precipitated World War I & sparked a chain of events that caused the dynasty’s collapse. Rudolf Steiner spoke quite a bit about his former incarnations, the most important being as Nero, in Karmic Relationships Vol. 2, lectures 7, 27 & Vol. 4 lecture 24

*1879 – Observers stated that there was an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, angels, & Jesus Christ (the Lamb of God) Knock Shrine (Irish: Cnoc Mhuire, “Hill of Mary” or “Mary’s Hill”) is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.

1883 – An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic

1888 – The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs

1897 – Oldsmobile is founded.

1904 – Birthday of Count Basie

1911 – The Mona Lisa is stolen by a Louvre employee

1914 – Deathday of Pope Pius X. particularly devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the specific title of Our Lady of Confidence; his papal encyclical Ad diem illum expresses his desire through Mary to renew all things in Christ, which he had defined as his motto. He promoted Thomas Aquinas as the principal philosophical method to be taught in Catholic institutions. After the 1908 Messina earthquake he filled the Apostolic Palace with refugees, long before the Italian government acted. He rejected any kind of favors for himself or his family

1921 – 1st publication of the weekly Das Goetheanum

1940 – Deathday of Leon Trotsky, murdered on Stalin’s orders

1942 – World War II: The flag of Nazi Germany is installed atop the Mount Elbrus, the highest peak of the Caucasus mountain range

1942 – World War II: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru

1991 – Latvia declares renewal of its full independence after the occupation of Soviet Union

1991 – Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses

1993 – NASA loses contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft

2013 – Hundreds of people are reported killed by chemical attacks in the Ghouta region of Syria

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Ella Manor Lapointe

Calendar of the Soul – 22nd Week [August 21, 2016 – August 27, 2016]

The light from world-wide spaces

Works on within with living power;

Transformed to light of soul

It shines into the spirit depths

To bring to birth the fruits

Whereby out of the self of worlds

The human self in course of time shall ripen.

~Rudolf Steiner, English translation by Ruth & Hans Pusch

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Your soul is the best friend you keep forgetting you have. It’s closer than your breath & older than death. It dreams like a mountain, laughs like a river, & communicates with you in the exuberantly mysterious style of animals & gods. You are animated because of your soul! It loves you with nonstop unconditional ingenuity. Isn’t it right, then, to devote at least one special day each year to honoring it & giving thanks for its blessings?

Today (along with the Baptism I will perform for a beautiful family this afternoon) I have scheduled my Soul Celebration Day:

Dear Soul-Self- Be my slow-motion dance. Be my centennial earthquake. Be my ripe pomegranate floating in a blue plastic swimming pool on the first day of winter. Be my handstand on a barstool, my whirlwind week in clown school, my joke shared with a Siberian shaman while shopping for socks at Wal-Mart. Be my puzzle with one piece missing. Be the waves crashing on a beach in New Zealand in the 22nd century. Be my golden hammer resting on the moss of a ten-million-year-old rock…

This kind of poetic thinking prompts me to ask: What would it be like to take a trip in your imagination to the future, where you will visit the person you’ll be, say 4 years from today? What is the most important message you have to convey to that future Self?